Madison teacher Desiree Tran spent two weeks teaching English to Ukrainian and Polish children on the Ukraine-Poland border.
Madison teacher Desiree Tran, holding the camera here, spent two weeks on the Ukraine-Poland border teaching English as part of an American Federation of Teachers program.
A welcome message written in English, Polish and Ukrainian.
K-12 education reporter
K-12 education reporter
Madison teacher Desiree Tran, holding the camera here, spent two weeks on the Ukraine-Poland border teaching English as part of an American Federation of Teachers program.
Desiree Tran talked about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine with her seventh graders at McFarland’s Indian Mounds Middle School in the spring.
A few months later, she was teaching English in a classroom near the Poland-Ukrainian border to a mix of 12-15-year-old Ukrainian and Polish students affected by the ongoing war. Tran’s trip last month was through the American Federation of Teachers, for which she filled out an application and was one of 15 teachers chosen to be part of the experience and the only one from Wisconsin.
“There was excitement, and also it was bittersweet, knowing the work that I was going to do and who I was doing that work for,” Tran said Wednesday. “I knew that I needed to do a good job for the kids because they deserved it.”
Her goals as she arrived, however, had little to do with language skills.
“My biggest goals were to make sure that my students felt cared about by me, felt safe and felt like they had a connection to something outside of what was happening in Ukraine,” Tran said. (For them to) just get a break from the shelling, the trauma that they are dealing with every day and just really foster those relationships and give them some happiness.”
A welcome message written in English, Polish and Ukrainian.
AFT President Randi Weingarten said in a statement that the trip was in line with how educators “have dedicated their lives to helping kids.”
“I’m so incredibly proud of their efforts to help build safe, joyful environments where kids could just be kids again, all while learning English, and having some fun under the most trying circumstances imaginable,” Weingarten said.
As Tran contemplated the trip in the few weeks between her acceptance and leaving, she anticipated some of the more academic aspects of the experience: accompanying students on activities, teaching them conversational English and building relationships. But upon beginning the program, she found a “blockade” between the Ukrainian and Polish students.
“I went in thinking that it would be easier to bring these two groups together since we were learning conversational English together and having fun,” she said. “But the reality is, there’s a lot more history between these two groups and the generations of families. There was a lot of separation, and there was a lot of work we had to do to really have these kids warm up to each other.”
She and the other teachers she worked with leaned on “fun and games” to do that, from red light, green light and Simon Says to dancing and karaoke, which she said the kids all loved.
“We did Michael Jackson karaoke everyday to end our day,” she said, adding that the kids “really bought into my personality and the way I was teaching them.”
Madison teacher Desiree Tran spent two weeks teaching English to Ukrainian and Polish children on the Ukraine-Poland border.
To get to a place where they were ready to learn, Tran “did a lot of front-loading” focused on the students feeling safe in the classroom with each other and with sharing anything they needed to with her. The first day, as emergency sirens went off while they played bingo outside, one of the students started shaking, Tran recalled, as the sirens sounded like air raid drills.
“She was really scared and I was like, ‘It’s OK,’” she said. “There was panic, there was a lot of time where I was comforting, I was talking through it with students.”
Given the context of what the students’ families faced, she avoided one of her go-to lessons for English Language Learners: talking about family dynamics. Instead, in the short time she had there, she allowed the students to lead the topics of conversation.
Tran did not speak Ukrainian or Polish, either, other than a few basic words and phrases she learned, so it was lucky that some students already knew some English. That made it especially meaningful when the students would use each other’s language to communicate, as well.
“When they were trying to help each other out using what they knew of each other’s language, that was really powerful,” she said. “It was really great to hear some of these kids’ stories, some of the Ukrainian refugee stories, and then see them happy and joyful and making memories together.”
Each day, they would spend three hours in class practicing basic English words and phrases, while after lunch they would volunteer in an activity organized by another group. In total, they spent an average of six hours a day together, she said.
Tran will return to the Madison Metropolitan School District this fall, where she spent her own K-12 education and taught for seven years at Mendota Elementary School. This time, she’ll be teaching sixth grade humanities at Spring Harbor Middle School, where she’ll have a new experience to share with her students — including the ones in Poland.
“My hope is to build something like a pen pal situation, but more of a FaceTime; ‘Hey, what are you doing in your school there? What are we doing here? What can we do together?’” she said. “Then it’s about the firsthand experience that I have with the kids and using that to enrich my lessons around history and what is going on with current events.”
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